
With OLTP, you run things like ‘record a sales transaction: one Honda Civic by Jane Doe in the London branch on the 1st of January, 2020’. Why do we treat these two categories differently? As it turns out, the two usage types have vastly different data-access patterns.
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A year before he published the paper, Arbor Software had released a software product called Essbase, and - surprise, surprise! - Codd’s paper defined properties that happened to fit Essbase’s feature set perfectly.Ĭomputerworld magazine soon discovered that Arbor had paid Codd to ‘invent’ OLAP as a new category of database applications, in order to better sell its product. Codd, in a 1993 paper titled Providing OLAP to User-Analysts: An IT Mandate.Ĭodd’s creation of the term wasn’t without controversy. The term was invented by database legend Edgar F. Online Analytical Processing (or OLAP) is a fancy term used to describe a certain class of database applications.
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If you’re a more experienced data analytics person, feel free to skip the first few sections, in order to get to the interesting parts at the end of this piece. This piece is written with the novice in mind. We’ll start with definitions of the terminology (OLAP vs OLTP), cover the emergence of the OLAP cube, and then explore the emergence of columnar data warehouses as an alternative approach to OLAP workloads. This essay seeks to be an exhaustive resource on the history and development of the OLAP cube, and the current shift away from it.

What are the tradeoffs? What are the costs? Is this move really as good as all the new vendors say that it is? And of course, there’s that voice at the back of your head, asking: is this just another fad that will go away, like the NoSQL movement before it? Will it even last?


And you might be rightly skeptical of this shift to columnar databases. It may seem bizarre to you that OLAP cubes - which were so dominant over the past 50 years of business intelligence - are going away. This is a huge change, especially if you’ve built your career in data analytics over the past three decades. The decline of the OLAP cube is a huge change, especially if you’ve built your career in data analytics over the past three decades. (*OLAP means online analytical processing, but we’ll get into what that means in a bit). One of the biggest shifts in data analytics over the past decade is the move away from building ‘data cubes’, or ‘OLAP cubes’, to running OLAP* workloads directly on columnar databases.
